10 ms·

SBCL: New in Version 2.2.1

107 points by susam 5y ago

labrador 5y ago
- stassats 5y ago
  Where does it say that?
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  SBCL is an open source, non-commercial, project. That means it largely depends on volunteer effort to get anything done and if the volunteers are insufficiently interested in or focused on Windows, you get the current result. If you do want Windows support for Common Lisp, happily it exists! But primarily from the commercial CL versions, LispWorks and Allegro CL.
  - labrador 5y ago
    Thank you. I'm sorry I was harsh, but I just spent a frustratingly long time getting Sketch to work on Windows, but I did it. MSYS2 to compile a missing lib was the missing piece that did it. I'm frustrated, but not giving up. https://github.com/vydd/sketch https://github.com/vydd/sketch
  - mark_l_watson 5y ago
    We used SBCL on a commercial medical AI project about 12 years ago, and we paid a monthly support stipend to a SBCL maintainer - really worth the money! I forget the guy’s name but he was there for us the few times we needed him.
- e12e 5y ago
  I was under the impression that most/all of the commercial lisps were quite windows centric? Now there does tend to be a connection between Foss software and Foss operating systems.
  - lispm 5y ago
    Both Allegro CL and LispWorks originally are coming from the UNIX world and they still support various UNIX variants: Linux, Freebsd, macOS and Solaris. Both support Windows. LispWorks also has runtimes for Android and iOS/iPadOS.
  - diskzero 5y ago
    LispWorks has a very good native Macintosh development environment as well as the CAPI interface library, which enables one to develop apps that use native widgets on multiple platforms. I do much of my development on my Mac for an application that is deployed on Linux.
    - lispm 5y ago
      The IDE and CAPI runs on all their desktop platforms: via Windows, macOS and GTK+.
- diroussel 5y ago
  It’s common that many languages find windows support hard as it’s so different to all the unix-like operating systems. Node.js used to have patchy support for Windows. It took time and investment from Microsoft themselves to fix that.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Windows is pretty much tier 1 for Allegro and Lisp Works, you get what you pay for.
- jlarocco 5y ago
  It's experimental because few of the developers (and few SBCL users) are on Windows, so it's possible more bugs slip through. Developing on Windows is terrible, so it's no surprise volunteers don't want to spend their time doing it. FWIW, I've used SBCL on Windows, and never had any problems. I wasn't using CFFI, POSIX, threads, or things like that, so that probably helped.
  - fsloth 5y ago
    "Developing on Windows is terrible" I presume you meant "developing SBCL" on Windows is terrible? Windows is a pretty good development platform nowadays with modern tooling - but it's certainly different than posix environments.
    - exdsq 5y ago
      Add WSL2 and it's pretty much there (if not better because of both worlds) and that's coming form someone who works exclusively nowadays on Mac, ChromeOS, and Linux.
    - fsloth 5y ago
      To clarify my position, my work include maintaining and developing a cross platform native codebase that serves Linux, Windows and macOS, in a global setting. I find each platforms native toolchain good in their own way. Each has it's particular quirks. The thing is that when you learn the quirks on one platform, the other platform has other quirks - hence it likely feels "worse" for a while, when in fact, it's just "different".
    - jlarocco 5y ago
      I don't know about SBCL in particular, I just meant Windows development in general is pretty bad compared to the other platforms. I'm using Visual Studio 2019 and ReSharper at work right now, and it's a slow, bloated mess compared to dev environments I've used on Linux and OSX. Sorry to rant, but I recently started a new job using Windows for the first time in about 10 years, and the slow dev environment is my only pet peeve.
- rscho 5y ago
- CJefferson 5y ago
  I work on several systems where windows is poorly supported. In general it's because everything else is POSIX(ish). Even though I use windows as my OS, I do most of my coding in WSL, so I still don't need a true windows version of things I work on. True windows support in my experience usually requires paying someone (unless you are doing something graphical, where Windows often is the best choice).
- sidkshatriya 5y ago
  > I know it doesn't want to be a serious language, but rather a toy for academic types Only "experimental" status on Windows is definitely unfortunate for Windows SBCL users. However, today in 2022, the server world has been eaten up by Linux. Few if any production server deployments would run on Windows -- there definitely might be some major ones but an overwhelming number would deploy to Linux. Then there would be a lot of developers that run Linux in a Virtual Machine, dual boot, use WSL/WSL2 or have a dedicated Linux machine. There is also a influential but niche developer crowd that runs MacOS. What I'm trying to say is that not having full support for Windows hardly implies "[SBCL] doesn't want to be a serious language, but rather a toy for academic types." A statement like this may have been true in 2000. Not in 2022. Windows is no longer the most important platform for people who either develop software or deploy software to servers. I am not trying to criticize Windows in any way. It's just the reality that a big chunk of development action is taking place on Linux (and in a niche way on MacOS) today.
  - exdsq 5y ago
    I don't know how true this is. Windows Server is massive in the enterprise corporate world. My first job as a system tech was spent exclusively on Windows machines across numerous large companies, and I've worked at several companies since that are Microsoft shops deploying to Windows Servers.
    - sidkshatriya 5y ago
      I never implied that Windows Server is not significant. It would definitely have a lot significant deployments. The absolute number of deployments would also be quite large. But I can bet that this will pale in comparison with Linux. Think about it -- all major cloud providers use Linux as a building block to provide their services. Their clients probably use Linux for deployment too. My objection was to the statement that "[SBCL] doesn't want to be a serious language, but rather a toy for academic types". And to that I implied that Windows is no longer as dominant in 2022 as it may have been, say, in 2000.
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't take HN threads into programming language flamewar. That's one of the things we most don't want here, and it's easy to avoid. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- rjsw 5y ago
  I deliver a product using SBCL on Windows, it works fine but I'm not using any features that might cause problems like threads or external libraries.
vmsp 5y ago
Is there anyone here using CL in production? If so, why -- compared to more mainstream solutions -- and how's your experience been?
- smegsicle 5y ago
  No reason not to, unless you can't trust your developers with high-power footgun features like.. multiple dispatch ??
- fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
  These people are: https://www.itasoftware.com https://www.itasoftware.com
- rjsw 5y ago
  I am, it is easier to write than C or C++ and faster than Python or Ruby.
- mmmm2 5y ago
  Grammarly, at least as of November, 2020: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/engineering/running-lisp-in-production/ https://www.grammarly.com/blog/engineering/running-lisp-in-p...
- diskzero 5y ago
  Yes. I have deployed mobile applications using native UI (SwiftUI, etc.) with all the shared logic in Lisp. To me, this was a better alternative than the usual C/C++ shared logic approach. My current application is a music hardware device that is mostly Lisp. As to why, this could be a lengthy post, and I am sure I have made one elsewhere on HN. It is a very good language, has many of the features that are being re-discovered and implemented in other languages, has an interactive model of development (REPL driven) that I find very productive and I can deploy an application across multiple platforms with little to no modifications. I do pay for LispWorks and it is more than worth it. I make a living developing applications and devices that use Lisp and the cost is covered by a fraction of a percentage of sales. Some people may try to use SBCL, CCL or other free implementations. I just don't have the time or risk tolerance to be dependent upon the lack of predictability for bug fixes or modifications needed to run on new architectures. The M1 architecture has been a big problem for some of these Lisps. CCL has no timeline for adoption and some commercial products are suffering as a result. GNU Scheme will probably never be able to run on the M1. LispWorks stays current and will fix reported bugs rapidly.
Koshkin 5y ago
SBCL is one of the two most useful Common Lisp implementations (the other one being Embeddable Common Lisp). I wish I could permanently move to the Common Lisp / emacs universe. Unfortunately, I am stuck in this one, called "the Real World."
- pjmlp 5y ago
  I consider Allegro and Lisp Works more useful, as they are closer to the original Lisp Machine/Interlisp-D development experience.
  - lispm 5y ago
    Load McCLIM into SBCL. See https://github.com/McCLIM/McCLIM https://github.com/McCLIM/McCLIM or https://mcclim.common-lisp.dev https://mcclim.common-lisp.dev It's available also via Quicklisp.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Yeah, I guess it has hardly changed, right?
      - phoe-krk 5y ago
        McCLIM has been changing a real lot, actually, as of late, with many useful changes and bugfixes and applications that use it, such as Clouseau the inspector.
        pjmlp 5y ago
        Thanks, I guess it is worth a revisit.
    - tut-urut-utut 5y ago
      Too bad this GUI framework doesn’t work on the most widespread end user OS.
walterbell 5y ago
What does the Common Lisp community think about the adoption of Clojure and ClojureScript by "knowledge graph" companies like Roam Research and clones like Obsidian (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28894481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28894481) and Athens (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26316793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26316793)? May 2020, https://athensresearch.ghost.io/why-you-should-learn-clojure-my-first-month-as-a-clojurian/ https://athensresearch.ghost.io/why-you-should-learn-clojure... > Clojure code is incredibly dense. If I have a file with 30 lines of code, it might as well be 1000 lines of java. I’m not exaggerating. The code does a whole lot in a few words and once you’re comfortable with Clojure, man you can whip out a web service really fast ... You will never want to program without a REPL again ... Clojure isn’t just function-oriented in its syntax; it can be object-oriented, and stack-oriented, and array-oriented, and so on–and mix all of these styles freely, in a controlled way. If you don’t like the way the language fits a certain problem, you can write a macro which defines a new language, specifically for that subproblem. Is Clojure considered a net positive for bringing more funding and developers into the family of Lisp dialects? Do Clojure developers graduate to CL?
- ravi-delia 5y ago
  I love Common Lisp, but frankly the purists are wrong on this. Clojure is a damn sight more of a lisp than any other even remotely common language. My preference now leans CL, but Clojure is a joy in its own right, with some of the nicest little touches I've seen in a language.
  - rscho 5y ago
    Why "more of a lisp"? I guess it depends on your personal definition of what a lisp is. For example, I'm much more interested in Racket because my interest is computer science.
    - exdsq 5y ago
      'More of a lisp' than other common languages is what I understand it to mean, not more of a lisp than Common Lisp or Racket.
alexott 5y ago
it would be really useful to add release dates to this page...
- rjsw 5y ago
  Today is the last Sunday of the first month of the year.
- stassats 5y ago
  Ok, I added the dates.
  - alexott 5y ago
    Thank you

107 points by susam 5y ago

stassats 5y ago
Where does it say that?
Jtsummers 5y ago
SBCL is an open source, non-commercial, project. That means it largely depends on volunteer effort to get anything done and if the volunteers are insufficiently interested in or focused on Windows, you get the current result. If you do want Windows support for Common Lisp, happily it exists! But primarily from the commercial CL versions, LispWorks and Allegro CL.
- labrador 5y ago
  Thank you. I'm sorry I was harsh, but I just spent a frustratingly long time getting Sketch to work on Windows, but I did it. MSYS2 to compile a missing lib was the missing piece that did it. I'm frustrated, but not giving up. https://github.com/vydd/sketch https://github.com/vydd/sketch
- mark_l_watson 5y ago
  We used SBCL on a commercial medical AI project about 12 years ago, and we paid a monthly support stipend to a SBCL maintainer - really worth the money! I forget the guy’s name but he was there for us the few times we needed him.
e12e 5y ago
I was under the impression that most/all of the commercial lisps were quite windows centric? Now there does tend to be a connection between Foss software and Foss operating systems.
- lispm 5y ago
  Both Allegro CL and LispWorks originally are coming from the UNIX world and they still support various UNIX variants: Linux, Freebsd, macOS and Solaris. Both support Windows. LispWorks also has runtimes for Android and iOS/iPadOS.
- diskzero 5y ago
  LispWorks has a very good native Macintosh development environment as well as the CAPI interface library, which enables one to develop apps that use native widgets on multiple platforms. I do much of my development on my Mac for an application that is deployed on Linux.
  - lispm 5y ago
    The IDE and CAPI runs on all their desktop platforms: via Windows, macOS and GTK+.
diroussel 5y ago
It’s common that many languages find windows support hard as it’s so different to all the unix-like operating systems. Node.js used to have patchy support for Windows. It took time and investment from Microsoft themselves to fix that.
pjmlp 5y ago
Windows is pretty much tier 1 for Allegro and Lisp Works, you get what you pay for.
jlarocco 5y ago
It's experimental because few of the developers (and few SBCL users) are on Windows, so it's possible more bugs slip through. Developing on Windows is terrible, so it's no surprise volunteers don't want to spend their time doing it. FWIW, I've used SBCL on Windows, and never had any problems. I wasn't using CFFI, POSIX, threads, or things like that, so that probably helped.
- fsloth 5y ago
  "Developing on Windows is terrible" I presume you meant "developing SBCL" on Windows is terrible? Windows is a pretty good development platform nowadays with modern tooling - but it's certainly different than posix environments.
  - exdsq 5y ago
    Add WSL2 and it's pretty much there (if not better because of both worlds) and that's coming form someone who works exclusively nowadays on Mac, ChromeOS, and Linux.
  - fsloth 5y ago
    To clarify my position, my work include maintaining and developing a cross platform native codebase that serves Linux, Windows and macOS, in a global setting. I find each platforms native toolchain good in their own way. Each has it's particular quirks. The thing is that when you learn the quirks on one platform, the other platform has other quirks - hence it likely feels "worse" for a while, when in fact, it's just "different".
  - jlarocco 5y ago
    I don't know about SBCL in particular, I just meant Windows development in general is pretty bad compared to the other platforms. I'm using Visual Studio 2019 and ReSharper at work right now, and it's a slow, bloated mess compared to dev environments I've used on Linux and OSX. Sorry to rant, but I recently started a new job using Windows for the first time in about 10 years, and the slow dev environment is my only pet peeve.
rscho 5y ago
CJefferson 5y ago
I work on several systems where windows is poorly supported. In general it's because everything else is POSIX(ish). Even though I use windows as my OS, I do most of my coding in WSL, so I still don't need a true windows version of things I work on. True windows support in my experience usually requires paying someone (unless you are doing something graphical, where Windows often is the best choice).
sidkshatriya 5y ago
> I know it doesn't want to be a serious language, but rather a toy for academic types Only "experimental" status on Windows is definitely unfortunate for Windows SBCL users. However, today in 2022, the server world has been eaten up by Linux. Few if any production server deployments would run on Windows -- there definitely might be some major ones but an overwhelming number would deploy to Linux. Then there would be a lot of developers that run Linux in a Virtual Machine, dual boot, use WSL/WSL2 or have a dedicated Linux machine. There is also a influential but niche developer crowd that runs MacOS. What I'm trying to say is that not having full support for Windows hardly implies "[SBCL] doesn't want to be a serious language, but rather a toy for academic types." A statement like this may have been true in 2000. Not in 2022. Windows is no longer the most important platform for people who either develop software or deploy software to servers. I am not trying to criticize Windows in any way. It's just the reality that a big chunk of development action is taking place on Linux (and in a niche way on MacOS) today.
- exdsq 5y ago
  I don't know how true this is. Windows Server is massive in the enterprise corporate world. My first job as a system tech was spent exclusively on Windows machines across numerous large companies, and I've worked at several companies since that are Microsoft shops deploying to Windows Servers.
  - sidkshatriya 5y ago
    I never implied that Windows Server is not significant. It would definitely have a lot significant deployments. The absolute number of deployments would also be quite large. But I can bet that this will pale in comparison with Linux. Think about it -- all major cloud providers use Linux as a building block to provide their services. Their clients probably use Linux for deployment too. My objection was to the statement that "[SBCL] doesn't want to be a serious language, but rather a toy for academic types". And to that I implied that Windows is no longer as dominant in 2022 as it may have been, say, in 2000.
dang 5y ago
Please don't take HN threads into programming language flamewar. That's one of the things we most don't want here, and it's easy to avoid. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
rjsw 5y ago
I deliver a product using SBCL on Windows, it works fine but I'm not using any features that might cause problems like threads or external libraries.

vmsp 5y ago

Is there anyone here using CL in production? If so, why -- compared to more mainstream solutions -- and how's your experience been?

smegsicle 5y ago
No reason not to, unless you can't trust your developers with high-power footgun features like.. multiple dispatch ??
fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
These people are: https://www.itasoftware.com https://www.itasoftware.com
rjsw 5y ago
I am, it is easier to write than C or C++ and faster than Python or Ruby.
mmmm2 5y ago
Grammarly, at least as of November, 2020: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/engineering/running-lisp-in-production/ https://www.grammarly.com/blog/engineering/running-lisp-in-p...
diskzero 5y ago
Yes. I have deployed mobile applications using native UI (SwiftUI, etc.) with all the shared logic in Lisp. To me, this was a better alternative than the usual C/C++ shared logic approach. My current application is a music hardware device that is mostly Lisp. As to why, this could be a lengthy post, and I am sure I have made one elsewhere on HN. It is a very good language, has many of the features that are being re-discovered and implemented in other languages, has an interactive model of development (REPL driven) that I find very productive and I can deploy an application across multiple platforms with little to no modifications. I do pay for LispWorks and it is more than worth it. I make a living developing applications and devices that use Lisp and the cost is covered by a fraction of a percentage of sales. Some people may try to use SBCL, CCL or other free implementations. I just don't have the time or risk tolerance to be dependent upon the lack of predictability for bug fixes or modifications needed to run on new architectures. The M1 architecture has been a big problem for some of these Lisps. CCL has no timeline for adoption and some commercial products are suffering as a result. GNU Scheme will probably never be able to run on the M1. LispWorks stays current and will fix reported bugs rapidly.

Koshkin 5y ago

SBCL is one of the two most useful Common Lisp implementations (the other one being Embeddable Common Lisp). I wish I could permanently move to the Common Lisp / emacs universe. Unfortunately, I am stuck in this one, called "the Real World."

pjmlp 5y ago
I consider Allegro and Lisp Works more useful, as they are closer to the original Lisp Machine/Interlisp-D development experience.
- lispm 5y ago
  Load McCLIM into SBCL. See https://github.com/McCLIM/McCLIM https://github.com/McCLIM/McCLIM or https://mcclim.common-lisp.dev https://mcclim.common-lisp.dev It's available also via Quicklisp.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Yeah, I guess it has hardly changed, right?
    - phoe-krk 5y ago
      McCLIM has been changing a real lot, actually, as of late, with many useful changes and bugfixes and applications that use it, such as Clouseau the inspector.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Thanks, I guess it is worth a revisit.
  - tut-urut-utut 5y ago
    Too bad this GUI framework doesn’t work on the most widespread end user OS.

walterbell 5y ago

What does the Common Lisp community think about the adoption of Clojure and ClojureScript by "knowledge graph" companies like Roam Research and clones like Obsidian (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28894481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28894481) and Athens (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26316793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26316793)? May 2020, https://athensresearch.ghost.io/why-you-should-learn-clojure-my-first-month-as-a-clojurian/ https://athensresearch.ghost.io/why-you-should-learn-clojure... > Clojure code is incredibly dense. If I have a file with 30 lines of code, it might as well be 1000 lines of java. I’m not exaggerating. The code does a whole lot in a few words and once you’re comfortable with Clojure, man you can whip out a web service really fast ... You will never want to program without a REPL again ... Clojure isn’t just function-oriented in its syntax; it can be object-oriented, and stack-oriented, and array-oriented, and so on–and mix all of these styles freely, in a controlled way. If you don’t like the way the language fits a certain problem, you can write a macro which defines a new language, specifically for that subproblem. Is Clojure considered a net positive for bringing more funding and developers into the family of Lisp dialects? Do Clojure developers graduate to CL?

ravi-delia 5y ago
I love Common Lisp, but frankly the purists are wrong on this. Clojure is a damn sight more of a lisp than any other even remotely common language. My preference now leans CL, but Clojure is a joy in its own right, with some of the nicest little touches I've seen in a language.
- rscho 5y ago
  Why "more of a lisp"? I guess it depends on your personal definition of what a lisp is. For example, I'm much more interested in Racket because my interest is computer science.
  - exdsq 5y ago
    'More of a lisp' than other common languages is what I understand it to mean, not more of a lisp than Common Lisp or Racket.

alexott 5y ago

it would be really useful to add release dates to this page...

rjsw 5y ago
Today is the last Sunday of the first month of the year.
stassats 5y ago
Ok, I added the dates.
- alexott 5y ago
  Thank you